Channels

Services

Fedora 19: MariaDB instead of MySQL, but no Btrfs

Fedora 19, which is expected to arrive in May, will use MariaDB instead of MySQL for applications that require MySQL. This means that the MySQL fork will replace the originating project in another distribution: Mageia's version 2 already made the switch from MySQL to MariaDB last year and the openSUSE developers plan to migrate with version 12.3, which is scheduled to be released in March.

The switch is not thought to affect users, because current versions of MariaDB are designed to be fully compatible with the original of the same generation; however, the two database systems will drift apart in the future. It seems unlikely that Fedora's switch will impact Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, the Fedora-based enterprise distribution that is currently in preparation, but future versions of RHEL may well be affected by it.

The switch to MariaDB is only one of numerous developer requests that the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) approved at an IRC meeting this week. For example, it also approved the proposal that, in new installations, udev should in future assign network device names itself instead of calling on biosdevname by default; udev has offered this functionality since systemd 197. If a user manually installs biosdevname, or specifies udev naming rules themselves, these would be used instead. FESCo has also approved the proposed integration of KDE's KScreen screen management software.

Among the rejections is Fedora Upgrade, a component that is designed to allow users to switch to a new Fedora version at runtime in the same way experienced users do with yum. Various reasons for the rejection can be found in the preliminary discussion; there, long-time Fedora developer Bill Nottingham listed several examples that would make upgrading at runtime impossible.

A number of further feature requests for Fedora 19 are still being discussed. For example, a member of the Apache project has proposed including Apache OpenOffice 4.0 in the distribution as an alternative to LibreOffice, which comes from the same roots. The use of Btrfs as the distribution's default filesystem has been discussed among the developers, but it hasn't been submitted as a request. As the deadline for submitting new feature requests for Fedora 19 has expired, version 19 of Fedora will most likely continue to use Ext4 as its default filesystem.